Empty quasi-intellectual wankery

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Q&A

Plinky Answers, all mashed up. This should make it clear that I’m both bored and feeling uncreative.

About how many books do you read each year?

As it happens, I know that to a pretty decent degree of accuracy! I’m sure there’s a lot of books that I’ve missed, especially the ones I didn’t like so much, and I start far more books than I finish so this is an ambiguous question anyway, but this page tells me I’ve read about 52, roughly, since I remember reading the Anita Blake books around this time last year.

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

I’d like to say “books” but we already know that doesn’t work so well. Besides, I wouldn’t open up “a shop.” I’d have some people in charge of getting the permits and I’d hire an army of unemployed people to put tiny little stalls every 200 metres in middle class neighbourhoods where you can buy snacks, non-alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. If I had to do it myself and it didn’t necessarily have to make enough money… books and coffee, but with more emphasis on high-end coffee than on the books.

When was the last time you visited a library?

I visited the “library” in our training centre just 2-3 weeks ago, although that was mostly to find a place to study rather than to refer to any material or take out any books.

Make a list of all the countries you’ve visited.

Reverse chronological order:

UAE

UK

USA

Hong Kong/Macau

Switzerland

UAE, again

Singapore

US, again

And I will be going to the western seaboard of the US and Canada in another month.

Have you ever tried to grow your own fruits or vegetables?

My parents/grandmother does, in the backyard at home, but I have never done much besides pick the fruit, and even that has been a while.

What’s the coolest airport you’ve been in?

Hmm. Singapore was the nicest. Dubai is very close. Chennai, Cochin and Mumbai are all horrible. The new terminal in Delhi is quite nice, about on par with most good airports anywhere.

Should coffee shops limit the amount of time that laptop users can occupy tables?

That depends! What vibe is the coffee shop trying to project? Of course the answer to “should coffee shops permit people to use their space/maybe wifi for free indefinitely” is no, but there are probably better ways of doing that/extracting value out of these people than explicit time limits.